by Pia Morrow
Suddenly, the city didn’t feel so safe. She hoped no one would look to find them here, even if it was clearly known as the place where anyone might gain employment.
By the time the sun dipped below the horizon and lit the sky with spectacular pinks and oranges, she had filled just one basket while Kiana was on her third. Besides the intense physical strain she was undergoing, she couldn’t stop thinking about the circus and how this beautiful dream might end so easily.
She didn’t tell Kiana about her worries - it was probably nothing, after all, but that night long after the sounds of snores and deep breathing rose around her, she found herself unable to sleep. She grasped Kiana’s hand as she lay there, as if that might keep her beside her.
A few days of apple-picking later, and Myra thought she might never be able to feel her arms again. That evening, they decided to venture out of the orchard for the evening, to stroll along the seafront and maybe buy some food with their hard-won earnings. Myra had argued against it at first, saying that if they spent nothing and subsisted off the meagre lunches they were provided with, they would save enough money quicker. As always though, Kiana won her over, and she supposed they deserved it after the week they had had.
The evening began pleasantly, like a dream. The autumn night air was warm with only the slightest hint of crisp in it and the seafront was pleasantly milling with other evening strollers. There were various street stalls, all of which smelled delicious, but finally she settled on a skewer of grilled seafood. Kiana bought an ice cream.
“You can’t eat ice cream for dinner,” Myra chastised.
“Oh yeah? Watch me.” She did. She watched the small rosebud mouth with its plump lips and her little tongue darting out to lick the ice cream and blushed as Kiana made a frankly indecent sound of appreciation.
“Don’t do that when we can’t…”
“When we can’t what?”
“We sleep in a hut full of people and you make it very difficult sometimes to…”
“To resist ravishing me?”
She hit her softly on the arm to hide her embarrassment, but she laughed still.
That’s when he called out to them.
“Hey! Tight-rope girl!” A few people turned around at that, confused. Myra felt her heart stop for a moment before she saw him. He was a pale, gangly man wearing mismatched clothes and a rather ridiculous hat, and he was waving right at them. More specifically, at Kiana.
They both froze, rooted to the spot as he weaved between the promenaders towards them. Myra’s brain suddenly began working again, and she moved to pull Kiana away, but it was too late.
“I know you,” he said breathlessly as he drew up to them.
“I think you must be mistaken, sir,” Kiana said coolly, and moved to turn away.
“I could have sworn Madame Elba’s got raided just the other week,” he said, thoughtful. That stopped them in their tracks. “See, word travels fast among circus folk.”
“I don’t know what you’re -”
“Heard she lost her best rope girl as well…talented little thing. Maybe I should let her know. Or the military, they’d be very interested to learn who stole their prize.” His eyes then drifted over to Myra for the first time. How could he know that much?
“What do you want?” Myra asked, finally.
He grinned, and she saw two of his front teeth were a shining silver, filed to an unnerving point. “Now who says I want anything? ‘Sides a friendly chat, with industry fellows.”
Myra remembered the conversation she’d overheard in the orchard. “You’re with the circus that’s in this town?”
“Yep, Mr. Zello’s Amazing Circus.” He stuck out a hand. “Frederic Zello.”
Neither of them shook it, but he simply laughed, teeth glinting in the lamplight.
“So, it just so happens I’m on the hunt for a new rope girl. And I’ve always admired your performance, very artful.”
Myra didn’t like the way he was looking at Kiana. Not one bit.
“I’m not available for work right now,” she said.
“Well, I’d pay a lot. No indenture, just ongoing payment. And I’ll keep you safe from Madame Elba. I’ll even pay you an acquisition fee. Enough for a ferry ticket, perhaps.” His eyes flickered briefly, then, to Myra.
She felt Kiana stiffen beside her.
When she said nothing, she grasped her hand. “We have to go, Mr. Zello.”
And before he could say another word, she dragged her friend away from the seafront, away from him. Still, he shouted after them, “You’ll come around, you know. They always do.”
They were quiet as they made their way back to the orchard. Kiana threw her ice cream away somewhere along the way, appetite ruined. Now the dreamlike quality of the evening had faded, she noticed the posters pasted on walls here and there: Mr. Zello’s Amazing Circus: a Show You’ll Never Forget. There were lurid drawings of performers in outlandishly bright clothing. Many of them were women, scantily clad, their figures anatomically unlikely if not impossible.
When they returned, Myra wasn’t ready to go back into their hut, squashed like sardines against all the other women workers. Uncharacteristically rule-breaking, she stole two apples from a basket that had been left aside and threw one to Kiana. They sat on the small wall outside the hut they usually occupied and Myra aggressively bit into the apple, payment for her ruined evenings.
“Why are you so quiet?” Kiana had barely looked at her since they left the seafront, her face blank in the way that told Myra she was actually thinking intensely.
“Is that not allowed now?”
Something must have shown on her face, even in the shadows, because she immediately sighed and shuffled closer to her. “Sorry. He just spooked me. He knew exactly what had happened, and he seems ready to use it against us.”
“He won’t,” Myra said, though she knew she was trying to convince herself as well. “He can’t be that desperate for you.” But then she remembered the look in his eyes when he looked at Kiana. Hungry. Determined. And she remembered the first time she had seen Kiana on the ropes. How magical, how perfect she had seemed, suspended above them all. If there was anyone to go to a bunch of trouble for, it was her.
“They get a reward now, you know. For turning in those with mage blood.” Her eyes were shining dark pools in the moon’s light.
“He doesn’t know where we are.”
“This is a small city, Myra. If he wants to, it won’t take him long to find us. And this is one of the few places that would give us jobs like this.”
“Well, what are you saying? We should leave? Find other jobs? Another city?” The thought of running more, on the pennies they had remaining to them tired her.
“Maybe…or maybe I should consider going with him.”
Myra frowned. “You can’t be serious.”
Kiana shrugged, and Myra couldn’t believe she was being so nonchalant about it. “I don’t want to, but at least that way you could take my fee and get out of here. One ferry out of the Dersen Empire and you’d never have to think about running again.” She looked up and suddenly seemed quite desperate. “Who am I to deny you that?”
“You’re everything,” Myra said quietly. It scared her to admit it, that Kiana was her life and more. Surely what she was feeling could never be reciprocated?
Kiana leaned forward to brush a hair out of her eyes, her fingers grazing her skin softly. “Sometimes, I worry you just haven’t known better,” she said quietly. “Maybe if you’d grown up with more love around you, you’d realise I’m nothing special. Nothing special at all, really.”
She threw her apple core onto the ground and grabbed Kiana’s hand. “Don’t tell me what I feel, Kiana. I don’t know much, but I know that.”
Her friend smiled at her, but the crease of worry in her forehead remained. Myra longed to kiss it away.
“Come on,” she said, standing up, reaching out a hand. “Let’s go to sleep. Gods know our problems will still be arou
nd to figure out in the morning.”
They curled up in the hut, fingers intertwined, and despite everything, Myra found she slept easily. It seemed like she had only slept for ten minutes when she was woken up by fearful muttering. The sun had risen, and it was a new day. The space beside her was cold and empty, and for a moment she panicked. Then she saw Kiana standing by the door. She looked terrified, and something about the light on her face was strange. Myra opened her mouth to ask what was wrong when she saw it: a fully grown apple tree right outside their door. Right where she had thrown her finished apple core, seeds and all.
It had not been there the night before.
Chapter 5
“We have to go,” Kiana said. “Now.”
Without another word, they gathered their things, as inconspicuously as they could. Around them, the other workers were muttering darkly about magic and the soldiers that would surely be on its tail. Their eyes easily avoided Kiana and Myra, and she was grateful. They were all outcasts of a kind here, and maybe that would help them. Nobody said anything as they swept out of the hut and out of a side gate, the few pennies they had earned left behind. As they left, they heard the steady beat of hooves approaching the main entrance. They had made it out just in time.
Myra felt dread unfurl in her gut like a dark, rain-filled cloud. Even after Kiana had told her her suspicions, she hadn’t believed it truly. She could never seem to believe in herself. It had cost them what little they had.
“I’m sorry,” she said numbly. “I didn’t even think -”
“It’s okay. It was an honest mistake and you’ll be fine.” Her face was tight and drawn. Myra longed to run a finger along that sharp jaw, loosen the muscles in her face.
“We’ll be fine,” she insisted.
Kiana said nothing.
Somehow, they found themselves back at the seafront, though at a different part this time. Here were the ferries, the departing families and escapees of undoubtedly magic blood. Crowds moved around them in frenzied groups and ferrymen shouted out last boardings for distant lands. They had been so close to this.
As she stared out to the roiling blue ocean beyond the crowds, she felt something cool and hard being pressed into her hand. She found Kiana’s hand clasped there, and when she took it away, there was her necklace in Myra’s hand. She frowned.
“What are you doing?”
“Take it,” Kiana said. “Take it and sell it and get on one of those boats.”
“Are you mad?” But the girl’s features were perfectly smooth as if she had decided for them both, and that was that. “I can’t do that.” She tried to give it back, but Kiana’s hands refused to open.
“Who were we kidding?” she said suddenly, and Myra noticed there were desperate tears in her dark eyes. “I can’t do anything but perform, Myra. I’ll be a dead weight, just like…like before.”
“Wait…you can’t be talking about going back?”
“I’m going to join Zello’s.”
A man pushing by with a crate of fresh fish jostled her and it was only Kiana’s firm grip shooting out to catch her that she didn’t fall. She pushed her hand away. “You’re leaving me?” All the air seemed to have escaped her lungs, and it had nothing to do with her near fall.
Kiana wrung her hands. “Let’s go somewhere less busy.”
“No, tell me now. Did you already decide this for the both of us?”
She sighed. “We have no choice. He’s going to expose us otherwise, and it’s..it’s for the best.”
“Whose best exactly? Because I don’t remember being consulted on this.”
Kiana reached out her hand, but Myra avoided it again. She should have known. Should have known she wasn’t worth leaving a country and a life behind for. How had she been so stupid? Embarrassment bloomed in her cheeks, but she tamped it down with anger.
“You’re just afraid. Afraid to try and be good at anything else. How will you keep doing this? Will you be walking the rope at sixty? Seventy? Because I don’t think people will pay quite as much to see you flap around in your little red dress then.”
Shame rose in her, hot and sour as bile the moment the words left her mouth. Kiana looked like she had been slapped and the tears finally spilt over.
“This is exactly why,” she said, her voice small but strong. “These things always go wrong, and I can’t risk your safety out of some insane need to protect something that would eventually break, anyway.”
Myra opened her mouth to apologise, but the words caught in her throat as a desire to sob and throw her arms around Kiana overcame her. She worked so hard to control herself; the moment was lost.
“Goodbye, Myra,” Kiana said, and a tear blurred moment later she had disappeared into the crowd.
Myra was left, simply standing and clutching the necklace. She felt eerily as she had when the soldiers had discovered her magic back at the circus. How easy it was, she reflected, for everything to fall apart in a moment. The flap of a canary’s wings, the seeds of an apple.
* * *
For a while, Myra simply stood at the port, as if waiting. She watched passengers arrive and depart on various boats and read entire stories in the furtive glances, the teary goodbyes, the passionate embraces. What had led them all here, she wondered? What lay in wait? Suddenly, it seemed she had no past and no future, and so she devoured all the stories she could glean from the port if only to distract from her own.
Eventually, the crowds thinned and night began to fall. She had no coins left and fool that she was, she couldn’t bring herself to sell the necklace. Not yet. In the morning, she told herself. In the morning, she would go to a pawnbroker and get the fair for a ferry ticket and never look back.
She wasn’t dense enough to presume that Kiana didn’t love her, had never loved her. They had shared too much for that. But it wasn’t enough. She wasn’t enough. Their time together had been a pleasant dream, a brief respite from the chaos of their normal lives. Nothing more and nothing less.
She was getting cold, but she had nowhere to go.
She wandered for a time, until the women and children disappeared into their homes and only the worst kind of men, with that hungry look in their eyes, prowled around her like wolves. Before any could pounce, she found herself a doorway, on the stoop of a quiet warehouse not far from the dock where she had begun and ended. She curled up into a ball and shrouded herself in the cloak - Kiana’s cloak - which she had given her and never taken back.
The step she lay on was hard and lumpy, and bits of stone jutted uncomfortably into her back. She shifted and felt that what she had assumed was another lump of rock was actually something wedged into an inside pocket of the cloak. She frowned in the darkness as she took out a tiny notebook. Myra could just about read, thanks to having to help out Aunt Elba with her books, but Kiana had never been trained in her letters. She opened it to the first page and something soft and feather-light fell onto her face. She propped herself up on one elbow and fished around in the dark for it. She found it on the hard stone - a tiny, yellow flower, dried and pressed between the pages of the book. She cocked her head and drew the flower to her nose, but its scent had long-since faded. She opened the next page and found another flower. And another. Between each page was a perfectly preserved, pressed flower: yellow, pink, orange, red. She recognised them, like figures in a once-seen painting. The flowers she had grown in those years she had amused herself with Aunt Elba’s seeds, in which she had thought them all to be magical. She snapped the book shut as tears pricked at her eyes, but the sobs shook her silently nonetheless as she attempted sleep in vain.